Enhance Your WordPress URL Structure: An In-Depth Guide to Removing Dates

Are you looking to eliminate dates from your WordPress URLs? While WordPress automatically includes dates in its default URL structure, this may not be ideal for everyone. In this comprehensive guide, we will provide you with a hassle-free method to remove dates from your WordPress URLs. By doing so, you can enhance the user experience, boost your site’s SEO, and create more visually appealing links.

Why Should You Eliminate Dates from WordPress URLs?

By default, WordPress generates URLs that contain post IDs and lack readability. Although functional, these URLs may not present a professional appearance. However, WordPress offers various options to customize your URL structure, making it more SEO-friendly and visually appealing.

Some users opt for either the “Month and name” or “Day and name” permalink formats, which add date parameters to the URLs. While these formats are an improvement over the default structure, they can result in unnecessarily lengthy URLs and make your content seem outdated over time.

To create concise, meaningful, and timeless URLs, many users prefer the “Post name” permalink format. This removes the date and includes only the post slug keyword in the URL, resulting in cleaner and more SEO-friendly links.

Important Considerations before Removing Dates

If your WordPress site is new, you can safely remove the date from the URLs right away. However, if your site has been established for a while, there are a few crucial things to consider before making any changes.

Changing the URL structure can lead to 404 errors for both users and search engines. This can potentially impact your search engine rankings and trigger warning messages in your Google Search Console reports. To mitigate these issues, it is essential to set up proper redirects.

In addition, changing the URL structure will reset your social share counts, as most social share count services do not track redirected URLs. Keep this in mind if social media engagement is important for your site.

Step 1: Create a Backup of Your WordPress Website

Before making any changes, it is crucial to create a complete backup of your WordPress website. This ensures that you can restore your site to its previous state in case anything goes wrong during the process.

Step 2: Removing Dates from WordPress URLs

To eliminate dates from your WordPress URLs, navigate to the “Settings” » “Permalinks” page in your WordPress dashboard. Here, select the “Post name” option as your permalink structure. Don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page to save your updated settings.

WordPress will now generate URLs without dates, using only the post name for both existing and future posts and pages.

Step 3: Setting Up Proper Redirects

To ensure a seamless transition and avoid 404 errors, it is crucial to set up proper 301 redirects. These redirects will automatically redirect users and search engines from the old URLs with dates to the new name-based URLs.

We recommend two methods to create 301 redirects in WordPress: using the “All in One SEO (AIOSEO)” plugin or the “Redirection” plugin.

Method 1: All in One SEO (AIOSEO) Plugin

The All in One SEO plugin provides a robust “Redirection Manager” feature that allows you to create bulk 301 redirects and automate the process. Follow these steps:

1. Install and configure the AIOSEO Pro plugin on your website.
2. After activation, go to “All in One SEO” » “Redirects” in your WordPress dashboard.
3. Click on the “Activate Redirects” button.
4. You will now see the “Redirects” tab in All in One SEO.
5. Add your first redirect by entering the old URL permalink structure (source URL) and the new post URL permalink (target URL).
6. Use regular expressions (Regex) to match the permalink pattern in the URLs that need redirection.
7. Ensure that the “Redirect Type” is set to “301 Moved Permanently”.
8. Click the “Add Redirect” button to save your changes.

Your redirects will now seamlessly direct users to the correct name-based URLs, effectively eliminating 404 errors.

Method 2: Redirection Plugin

If you prefer a free option, you can use the Redirection plugin. Follow these steps:

1. Install and activate the Redirection plugin on your WordPress site.
2. Go to “Tools” » “Redirection” in your dashboard and click the “Start Setup” button.
3. Follow the setup wizard of the plugin, selecting the desired options.
4. Click “Finish Setup” and “Ready to begin!” to access the plugin’s settings page.
5. Click the “Add New” button or scroll down to the “Add new redirection” section.
6. Enter the old URL structure (source URL) and the new URLs (target URL).
7. Select “Regex” from the drop-down menu.
8. Click “Add Redirect” to save your changes.

The Redirection plugin will now redirect users to the new name-based URLs, ensuring a smooth transition.

In Conclusion

By removing dates from your WordPress URLs, you can create cleaner and more professional-looking links. Follow the step-by-step instructions provided in this in-depth guide to easily get rid of dates in your WordPress URLs. Additionally, ensure that you set up proper redirects to avoid 404 errors. Streamlining your URLs will significantly enhance the user experience and contribute to your site’s overall SEO efforts.

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